Security attacks of web applications are fairly common occurrences. A web application typically includes one or more web pages, and vulnerability on one web page can compromise the web application or even he web site running the web application. A web page may be vulnerable to many types of attacks.
Security testing of web applications is difficult and time consuming. Security of a web application is often times not specified as part of the application. Specifying security is very difficult, and implementing security measurements may not be correct. Security testing of a web application is also difficult. Furthermore, security testing of web applications requires extensive domain-specific knowledge. Also, new methods of breaking into web sites are found regularly, leading to the need to continuously track new security vulnerabilities.
One type of attack involves cookie stealing. Cookies are defined as small data files written to a user's hard drive by some web sites when the user views the website by way of a browser. These data files contain information the web site can use to track such things as passwords, lists of pages the user has visited, and the date when the user last looked at a certain page. The stealing of cookies can be used to gain access to a user's account on a web site or to provide information (such as credit card information) regarding the user. Once this information gets into the wrong hands, the attacker can access the web site and the user's information can be used by the attacker to perform a variety of tasks.
Another type of attack is known as a System Query Language (SQL) attack. Web applications typically use data from a user to construct SQL queries. In some instances a simply constructed query leads to a vulnerability wherein a user can execute arbitrary SQL queries against a database and acquire information such as passwords, social security numbers, credit cards numbers and the like.
An attack of a web site can be performed simply, by people who are generally non-technical. For example, it was recently reported that several Internet commerce sites using a particular shopping cart application were vulnerable. A user would enter the site and select items to purchase by placing them in to the application shopping cart. The user could then save the form to a local disk drive, edit the price in the form with a text editor then reload the form back into the web browser. The user would then purchase the items for the price entered by the user, instead of the actual price.
In view of the above, it would be desirable to have a method that provides testing and analysis of possible security threats to a web page so that appropriate action can be taken to make the web page less vulnerable to potential security attacks.